Thanks everyone for being SO patient the last few months during my recital and move. I’m finally catching up to some of your piano teaching questions. Don’t forget, you can always ask me a question about teaching piano by leaving a comment in the post or sending me an email.
Onto the question! (Other teachers, I’m curious to hear your thoughts, please comment below!)
Problem Area – Musical Stuttering
Recently someone asked for ideas on how to help her daughter correct a musical stuttering habit that has gone on for years, and has never been addressed. The student is now 13 and has been playing since she was 5.
By stutter, I take it to mean that perhaps at the beginning of a measure or phrase she may strike the first note a few times before continuing. Or perhaps she leaves pauses between the measures and phrases.
Isolate the Cause
As with any issue like this, the best way to find a fix, is to look for a cause. WHY does this stutter happen?
You can usually do this by breaking it down into some simple steps, that take a bit of keen observation. This is where I usually begin.
1. Observe your daughter play normally. See if you can notice anything that correlates to the stuttering. This could correlate to the content of the music, ie: certain notes or rhythmic patterns. Does she also look at her hands (and not the book)? Does it happen whether a piece is memorized or not? Does it happen with scales and exercises? You’re looking to isolate specific situations where the stuttering happens vs. doesn’t happen.
2. If you’re having trouble finding any of these correlations, that’s when you step in and ask her to play things differently – as a way to diagnose the problem – like a test. It’s hard to say exactly what to do without seeing her play, but my top suggestions would be:
- Ask her if she can count the beat, or subdivision (like 8th notes or 16th notes) while she plays. You want to check that she can feel the beat accurately, and also understand the subdivisions. Note: This is my vote for one of the top possible causes. See a possible fix below.
- Ask her to tap the rhythm of each hand on the lid of the piano. This isolates rhythm completely by taking out the notes, but still requires two hand coordination and playing in tempo.
- Ask her to name the notes (without looking at the piano). Just to make sure there’s nothing going on with note recognition. Unlikely this is causes stuttering, but you want to rule out easy things too!
- Ask her to play something much slower than usual. Maybe she’s just trying to play things too fast and tempo is the issue.
- Ask her to play only two measures of something. Maybe executing anything too long causes it.
- Ask her if she can play something relatively easy without looking at her hands. I also notice lots of being uncomfortable at the piano is an over-dependance on looking at your hands.
- Ask her to improvise, and see if the stutter is the same. This would be a huge discovery if she actually stutters while playing something that is not pre-written, with no rights or wrongs. It could indicate something deeper going on that just a discomfort with rhythm.
- Also, observe how she’s breathing, and her general demeanor. Is she relaxed? Breathing deeply? Shoulders down? You’d want to be sure there isn’t extra tension in the body that could be contributing to it.
- How is her sitting position hen playing? Does her back and body generally stay upright and “centered”? Or does it sway side to side or forward and back in an unnatural manner?
Think of a car. It has all different parts that work together. To figure out where something is going wrong, you isolate individual elements as much as possible to try and narrow in on the problem. Music is tricky, because many of the elements are so abstract. I always think of the separate elements in playing piano, and how to pull certain ones in and out – notes, rhythm, tempo, hands, where you look, how you sit, etc. You’re trying to isolate situations where she does stutter, and doesn’t stutter.
I guarantee, if you look hard enough, and work in a fun and clever way with the student, you can find what’s causing the stutter, or any challenge area. Once you find the cause, the hard work has been done. Then you actually know what to work on to correct the issue.
Without seeing the student play, my guess is that the stuttering is a challenge with rhythm (either feeling the beat, or counting) – and something technical (not feeling comfortable at the instrument).
But the takeaway is, you won’t know what to do to fix the issue if it hasn’t been properly diagnosed.
So begin helping her isolate all the elements of music to find which is specifically contributing to the stutter. You’ll find it!
If Rhythm Is the Issue – How To Fix It
Let’s go over how to start the correction process with one of the possible causes: rhythm. Remember, this is assuming we’ve established with some confidence that discomfort with rhythm is causing her to stutter.
To be more specific, let’s say that when checked with a metronome, she has a tendency to rush. And she may even have trouble keeping a steady beat at all. How do you fix this (which would fix the stutter at the same time)? You have to work backwards, to find something she can do, anything, correctly.
The goal in this possible scenario, is to find music where she can count a steady beat out loud, and not rush the tempo. It doesn’t matter if its level one method book material. What matters, is to find a place where she can play something steady and without a stutter.
There are two ways to approach this. You can either decrease tempo, or decrease the level, or both. Painfully slow is fine. Then over time, you can work to increase these two things gradually, making sure the stutter does not come back. If it does, slow it down or bring it down a level.
What Are Your Thoughts? Please Comment!
Other teachers out there reading, have you had any students with this type of challenge and what have you done that has helped?
July 3, 2011
How To Teach Piano, Teaching Rhythm